Every year, as the clock strikes midnight and a new year begins at midnight on January 1, people make New Year’s resolutions. The most common ones are things like eating more vegetables, reading more, or finally using that exercise bike that’s been collecting dust in the basement. Another New Year’s tradition is breaking those resolutions. The problem for many isn’t that they set goals that are unrealistic, but rather that they have no plan to get them done. Implementing, and scaling Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) is notorious for its difficulty and complexity, and without a plan they can go by way of the ill-conceived New Year’s resolution to finally stop eating candy.
Contrary to popular belief, IGA is not simply just about software, it requires marrying technology, people, and processes to truly make it work. Many enterprises today may have purchased IGA solutions with the goal of assigning and right-sizing access rights for identities across a variety of applications, infrastructure, and data sets. However, Gartner estimates that 50% of current IGA deployments are in distress which is caused by a wide variety of reasons. Most can be distilled down to the fact that Identity & Access Management (IAM) teams responsible for IGA programs get overly ambitious with their plans of grandeur for all the things they are going to use IGA for.
As with New Year’s Resolutions, having a plan to execute any IGA initiatives requires foresight and planning. Common pitfalls of advancing an IGA program lead to complex customizations, gathering data without the infrastructure to use it to drive decisions, and infighting about who is responsible for what. Omada IdentityPROCESS+ is a comprehensive, best practice process framework, which describes the most important processes needed to ensure a successful IGA deployment, with guiding principles on how to deploy and scale.
Within IdentityPROCESS+, there are detailed guidelines and frameworks for how to implement various processes to help ensure organizations are in accordance with best practices. The goal is not to do everything at once, rather, the processes help document who has access to what, along with a justification as to why they have that access and can easily map to wherever an organization is along their IGA journey. For beginners, through PROCESS+, users can be easily onboarded with correct access rights, and the ability to easily terminate access when it is no longer needed. Further, when employees or contractors change roles, their access rights are seamlessly changed, while providing administrators with improved efficiency when managing user identities through improved workflows and automation. Finally, it allows for the ability to perform ad hoc and/or periodic audit reviews and analysis to ensure that users have the right access to the appropriate systems to perform their jobs.
Whatever the goals of an IGA program may be, having a plan in place is just as important as the goal itself. Aligning technical, business, and end-users of the goal, both at a high level (i.e. improving security) and a granular level (i.e. reducing the number of orphaned accounts by 25%) will help get buy-in for the people that are administering the IGA solution, those that are interacting with it, and those that pay for it. Don’t let IGA plans go to waste, by thinking that technology alone will solve your problems, otherwise you may be back on January 1, 2023 wondering why you’re making the same resolution again.
Learn more about Omada IdentityPROCESS+ by reading this e-book and make your resolutions a reality!
